


Just Around the Corner

by scioscribe



Category: The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon - Stephen King
Genre: Future Fic, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-23
Updated: 2018-09-23
Packaged: 2019-07-15 19:37:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,248
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16069889
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: The contents of her purse fluctuate with the seasons.  In the summer, there’s always a mini-can of bug spray, the high-grade crap that’s covered top-to-bottom with warning labels.





	Just Around the Corner

**Author's Note:**

  * For [escritoireazul](https://archiveofourown.org/users/escritoireazul/gifts).



They say the streets in Boston were mapped from cow-paths: it’s easy to get lost there.  Trisha keeps her phone charged and carries a map in her sturdy, cross-bodied purse.  A map, a granola bar, a sports bottle, a matchbook, a keychain that looks like a blunted railroad spike.

“I’m an undercover survivalist,” she says to Pepsi Robichaud when Pepsi comes to visit her—Pepsi who still wears her childhood nickname unselfconsciously twenty years later and who is never bothered by what she calls Trisha’s weird shit.  She fans her hand out over the table where she’s upended her purse, feeling like a jeweler’s assistant delicately demonstrating a diamond necklace against the smooth back of her wrist.  It’s a gesture that means she’s selling something, but what?  To whom?  “Food, water, fire, weapon.  And directions.”

“I bet you get more questions about the map than anything else,” Pepsi says, "when you could just use your phone," and then she wanders off to rifle through Trisha’s drawer of takeout menus.

The contents of her purse fluctuate with the seasons.  In the summer, there’s always a mini-can of bug spray, the high-grade crap that’s covered top-to-bottom with warning labels.

Sometimes she sits in on these meetings for trauma survivors.  They’re earnest and stilted— _What do you think is going to happen to you?  Can you articulate your concerns?_ —and not entirely unhelpful.  One day—she sees it speeding towards her like a fastball—she will stand up in one of these sessions and talk about the terrible time she was lost in the woods.  She will start off with facts, pounds lost and days spent in the hospital, but she will end by saying, each word slow and sticky with reluctance, that what scares her most is what she saw there.  How malnutrition, exhaustion, fever, and plain old childhood imagination combined into a woodcut-dark and -strange vision.  The God of the Lost.

This is a way to move on, she knows.  And after all, it’s been so long, who is she to say what that little girl saw or didn’t see?  Her mom has remarried, her dad has his ten-year token from AA, her brother moved to California and then back halfway east to Kansas City, the Red Sox won a World Series, and Tom Gordon doesn’t pitch anymore.

But some small tough tootsie voice in her head tells her that all the changes are superficial.  Getting lost is still the same old game.

So one night Trisha grabs her pack—her _purse_ —and walks out of her apartment.  She enters the rabbit warren of Boston streets and takes turn after turn after turn, heedless.  She has to know.  She needs to know the depth of all she won’t ever understand.

And the years fall away.  No one looking at her now, her face white and rigid with tensed muscles, would think she is Trisha McFarland, high school music teacher, intramural softball shortstop, lifelong Red Sox fan.  She barely looks human.

But Boston isn’t the woods.  There are storefronts around her, even if most of them are shuttered and dark.  The only trees are contained in dirt islands on concrete seas.  Boston isn’t the woods, and that should be enough, but it’s not.  Lost is lost is lost.

She can feel its eyes on her.  Always waiting in the dark.  She didn't kill it, after all.

 _The apostate_ , the God of the Lost whispers to her.  _Once you are lost you can never again be found.  I drew my circle around you, and that is the only direction you need: all you need to know is that you will go around and around and around with me.  Worship me with your terror and I will make the arc of that circle so wide you will hardly even know how trapped you are, you will hardly even feel the snare until it closes.  I will let you grow old.  I will let you grow_ ripe.

The streetlight at the end of this block is out.  The shadows gather thickly there, over the trashcan that is buzzing hot with late-summer wasps feeding on the rot.

Trisha stands still for a moment— _I have ice-water in my veins_ —and then reaches in to her purse.  She takes out each item that her old, lingering terror made into a kind of household god and she lays them on the sidewalk: matchbook, granola bar, water bottle, railroad spike keychain wrenched free of the distraction of its keys.  Last of all the map.  _What path?_ Tom Gordon said to her once, or didn’t.  She no longer thinks it matters.

She has no Walkman now.  No kindly hunter, woodcutter to her Red Riding Hood.

She meets its eyes.  Its crawling wasp eyes, yellowjacket eyes.  How she must enrage it, she thinks distantly, if after all this time it is so eager to see her, to fulfill the claim it laid so long ago.

You can close one game, Trisha understands, but the season is long.  Sooner or later, that bad old bases-loaded ninth inning will come back and you will have to get the save again, if you can.  No one victory makes the rivalry go away.

“There is no path,” Trisha says to the God of the Lost.  “Cows made these roads.  I don’t need your direction.  I’ll wander.  I’ll wander all my life if I have to and maybe you’ll kill me, but I won’t walk your circle, I won't believe in it, I won’t worship you.  I don’t live in your kingdom.  This is my fucking city, this is _Tom’s_ city, and this is my world, not yours.  I’m home, and you’re nothing.”

*

A week later, Pete flies out for a visit.  He looks at the dirt in the treads of her shoes and his mouth gets small and tight, puckered with his own bad memories.  He doesn’t ask her about the dirt, which is good.  She doesn’t know how to describe how she spent that weekend.  A thin nylon sheet of tent between her and the sky, a handful of dusty blackberries eaten straight off the bush, a few minutes—but no more than that—spent watching the way the shadows shifted way up ahead of her where the stream began to feed into the bog.  How she watched those shadows watch her back with wary, ancient hatred.

A week after that, she goes back to the trauma survivors group.  She stands up.  _My name is Trisha McFarland_ , she says, _and when I was nine years old, I was lost for days in the Appalachian woods.  I almost died—when they found me, I’d lost almost twenty pounds and I had pneumonia in both my lungs._

Pounds lost.  Days spent in the hospital.  As though it’s that simple.

_What do you think is going to happen to you?  Can you articulate your concerns?_

_No,_ Trisha thinks, as she takes her seat again.  _And I can live with that._ Past a certain point, the words are just another way of thinking about the path: she believes there is a line after which it isn’t useful to believe in them.

She goes out for a beer; she goes home; she turns on the TV.  The Red Sox are having a hell of a season.  Their path to the World Series is clear, the announcer says, making Trisha cover her face with her hands.  Why do they say things like that?  That’s how you get doomed.


End file.
